DESOTO — Football is back at Meadow Creek Park — 20 months after the fields were rendered unsafe when a tornado roared through the area.

"Under the circumstances, this is great," said parent Domonic Jenkins as he watched his 8-year-old son make his football debut with the DeSoto Colts. "The field definitely seems to be holding up."

Opening-day festivities Saturday were drenched in rain, but it was nothing compared to what happened the day after Christmas 2015, when tornadoes ripped through North Texas — including Glenn Heights and southern DeSoto — leaving eight people dead in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

In Glenn Heights, which is close to Meadow Creek, at least 200 homes were heavily damaged or destroyed, but no fatalities occurred.

Shrapnel in the field

Some of the debris from those homes made its way to the youth league fields at Meadow Creek Park, embedding metal shrapnel and other dangerous objects deep into the soil.

Initial damage estimates came in a $2.2 million, but final totals came in at $1.6 million, said Kathy Jones, the city of DeSoto's communications director.

A little over $700,000 of that total will be reimbursed by FEMA, Jones said. The rest came from insurance coverage and the city's general fund reserve.

"Probably in the beginning, when we started pulling debris out, it was like an onion. It just kept getting bigger and bigger," said Phil Lozano, assistant director of the DeSoto Parks and Recreation Department. "We were pulling things out that were 2 to 3 feet deep."

On Saturday, the green, freshly mowed fields showed no signs of the earlier damage.

"This looks really great, especially compared to the way it was," said Paul Smith, founder of the Southwest Longhorns, an organization that fields four teams in different age groups. "I was part of the group that inspected the fields, and I knew how difficult it was to get things ready."

Home, sweet home

Last year, Smith's Longhorns and the other teams of the DeSoto Youth Football League had to go elsewhere for their games. Most games were split between DeSoto West Middle School and DeSoto High School's football practice fields.

"It worked out great, but this is better now because we can have all of our teams in one place," Smith said.

Though football games were played on the fields for the first time since the tornado hit, the fields officially reopened on July 1 for a fireworks show.

The broken windows of the announcers' booth were among the signs of damage suffered at Meadow Creek Park when a tornado hit on Dec. 26, 2015.

(Ben Torres/Special Contributor)

"You better believe we were playing close attention, but the fields were fine," Lozano said. "We came back afterward with a magnet and picked up earrings and little things like that, but those were probably lost that day and not related to the storm damage."

During cleanup, Galveston-based DRC Emergency Services raked the fields multiple times with industrial magnets to pick up debris. They turned up metal, glass, screws, concrete nails, roofing nails, plastic nails, wood and the nubs of cleats.

The cleat debris was probably there before the December 2015 storms, Lozano said.